A hundred thousand square feet of gallery space and more than thirteen hundred objects opened at once in Exposition Park on 22 September, which is an unusual thing for a city to absorb. The standard response to a museum of this size is to attempt all of it in one visit, get to gallery nineteen, and stop taking anything in. It is worth deciding on a route before you go through the door.
A new museum with thirty galleries is a way to spend four hours and remember none of it. Ask Karpo for a route through the things near you rather than a list of them.
What the building is
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art occupies a three-hundred-thousand-square-foot building by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec, lifted off the ground so that the park runs underneath it. It sits in a thirteen-acre campus with new gardens designed by Mia Lehrer's Studio-MLA.
The raised underside is the part worth arriving early for. You can walk beneath the building in the open air before you buy anything, and the relationship between the curve overhead and the park around it is the strongest single architectural idea on the site.
The premise, which is not obvious from the name
Narrative art means art that tells a story, and the collection is built on categories that most large museums have historically kept at arm's length: illustration, comic art, manga and graphic novels, children's book illustration, science fiction imagery, murals, photography and cinematic material.
There are dedicated galleries for Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth and Frank Frazetta — three artists whose work has hung in millions of homes and in relatively few museums. Whatever you think of that as a curatorial argument, it is a real one, and it is the reason this is not simply another large collection in a new building.
A route that works
Start on the first floor with The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, The Sacred. It is the introduction and it sets the frame for everything above it; skipping it and going straight to the film material is the most common mistake and leaves the rest feeling arbitrary.
Then go straight to the top. The fifth-floor gallery on monumental storytelling in public contexts is the one most people run out of energy before reaching, and descending through a building is easier than climbing it. Work downwards, and treat Star Wars in Motion — the cinema gallery with vehicles and props — as the reward near the end rather than the opening act, because nothing looks good immediately after it.
- Exposition Park; opened 22 September 2026
- More than 1,300 works across 30-plus galleries in 100,000 square feet
- Building by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec; 13-acre campus
- Open Monday and Wednesday to Thursday 10am-5pm, Friday 10am-9pm
- Saturday 9am-9pm, Sunday 9am-5pm; closed Tuesdays
When to go
Read the hours carefully, because they are not the usual ones. It is closed on Tuesdays. Friday runs until nine in the evening and Saturday runs nine in the morning until nine at night — a twelve-hour Saturday, which is generous and means the early and late ends of that day are genuinely quiet.
Nine in the morning on a Saturday at a new museum is the single best slot available in the city right now, and it is the one nobody books. Two hours from opening, out by eleven, with the rest of the park and the whole afternoon still ahead.
How long it actually takes
Thirty-plus galleries is roughly the scale of a major European national museum wing, and the honest answer is that you cannot do it. Two and a half hours is a good visit; four is a bad one, because the last ninety minutes will be spent walking past things at a speed that registers nothing.
Plan two visits instead of one long one if you are local. The collection runs to more than forty thousand works, of which the thirteen hundred on display is a rotating slice, so this is a building designed to be returned to rather than completed. Treating a new museum as a box to tick is the fastest way to never go back.
If you are visiting the city and this is your single shot, do the first-floor introduction, two thematic galleries that sound interesting, one artist room and the cinema gallery. Five stops, properly, in two hours, and then go and sit in the Rose Garden.
The park around it
This is the part that turns a museum visit into a day, and it is why Exposition Park is a better destination than any single institution in it. The Natural History Museum is a few minutes' walk and is free to Los Angeles County residents on weekday afternoons between three and five. The California Science Center is free to enter. The Rose Garden, seven acres of it, is free and is the correct place to sit down afterwards.
USC is directly across Exposition Boulevard, which means the surrounding streets have cheap food and a student-town density that most museum districts lack entirely. The whole cluster is walkable end to end in fifteen minutes.
Getting there
The E Line stops at Expo Park/USC, and this is one of the few major Los Angeles attractions where rail is unambiguously the better option — the station is at the edge of the park and you walk in. Parking exists in the park structures and lots, and on any day when something is also happening at the stadium or the Coliseum it becomes a considerable problem.
Check whether there is a game or an event on before you drive. Exposition Park's traffic is not a function of the museums; it is a function of eighty thousand people arriving for something else at the same time, and it will turn a fifteen-minute drive into an hour.
Practical notes
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened on 22 September 2026 in Exposition Park, in a 300,000-square-foot building by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec, on a 13-acre campus with gardens by Studio-MLA. More than 1,300 works are shown across 30-plus galleries in 100,000 square feet, covering illustration, comic art, manga, murals, photography and cinematic material, with dedicated rooms for Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth and Frank Frazetta. Opening hours are Monday and Wednesday to Thursday 10am-5pm, Friday 10am-9pm, Saturday 9am-9pm and Sunday 9am-5pm, closed Tuesday. Start with the first-floor introduction, go to the fifth floor and work down, and take the E Line to Expo Park/USC rather than driving.
Tags: #LosAngeles #LucasMuseum #ExpositionPark #NeighborhoodGuides #Museums #NarrativeArt #MADArchitects #ThingsToDoLA #SouthLA #Illustration #ComicArt #LAArt #DayOut #USC
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Ask Karpo first
Want a route rather than a list — what to see first, what to skip, and what else is within walking distance? Ask Karpo about the district you are heading to.
